by Thomas Perry
Spencer heard an unexpected noise, the sound of engines. He stepped to the narrow window of the room and looked out to the courtyard. He saw the automatic gate swing open slowly. As the gate opened inward, vehicles began to nose their way in.
There were three cars, three identical black SUVs. Spencer knew security men liked that method of transport, because it was a shell game that made the enemy guess which cup held the pea. Somebody important was in one of the cars. Was a dignitary about to visit Faris Hamzah, or did he rate this kind of treatment?
Spencer watched the first two SUVs clear the gate and follow the paved drive to approach the front of the house. The first two SUVs pulled forward to the second building and stopped, but the third stopped in front of the main house’s entrance. The headlights went out, returning the courtyard to night.
Spencer was mesmerized. He had been imagining a moment like this for the past two years. He had pictured this compound and thought of ways of getting in, and what he would do if he had the chance. But the place had changed, and there were so many men in these vehicles, and now there were cameras. He had come to the compound tortured by the idea that he might simply study the place all night and not find a way in. Then he was sure he had chosen the wrong night. But maybe this was the time.
He heard the car doors open and watched the occupants jump to the ground, and then step away from the vehicles. He watched men emerge from the first two vehicles before they shut the doors and the dome lights went off. They carried assault rifles as they walked to the farther two-story building and went inside. The first men into the building turned on lights, and he could see through the open door that the place was furnished like a barracks, with rows of bunk beds.
Spencer counted six men in each vehicle. The routine, the way this convoy had been organized, reminded him of the day when he had seen Hamzah going ahead of time to the place where he had agreed to meet. He had a growing hope that the important man in the vehicle parked below by the entrance to the house was Faris Hamzah.
The pair of watchmen he had seen on the first floor opened the main entrance’s double doors, letting a patch of light from the house spill out to the courtyard. Then they stood on the portico stiffly with their eyes straight ahead like an honor guard.
The two front doors of the SUV opened and the driver and a man in the front passenger seat got out carrying rifles. They took positions facing each other a few feet apart in the eight-foot space between the front steps and the side door of the SUV, their eyes scanning the middle distance, rising to look at nearby roofs, then to the side.
The side door of the SUV opened. Spencer could see a pair of legs wearing low black shoes and pressed khaki pants like a summer dress uniform ease out so they dangled from the seat. A thin metal shaft came out beside the right leg. A rifle? It extended farther. A cane?
Spencer stared. It was a cane. Faris Hamzah had been at least forty-five when he had met him more than thirty years ago. Of course he would be old. The two feet and the cane reached the ground. The man was visible from above, standing in the light from the open doors of the house, but Spencer couldn’t see his face.
He wanted to be sure. If this man wasn’t Faris Hamzah, Spencer was about to die for nothing. He gripped his pistol with his left hand and waited.
The man took a step, and then another. He pivoted to his right, toward the barracks, and looked at it for a moment. Then he turned to the left toward the rear of the SUV, and Spencer could see his face.
The face was old, and the hair, beard, and eyebrows were white, but he was Faris Hamzah.
Spencer slipped out of the storeroom and moved quickly down the hall to the space at the railing near the staircase, then looked down at the front entrance. Faris Hamzah stepped into his foyer and watched the two night watchmen close and lock the big double doors, and then slide the dead bolts into the floor. He spoke to them in low tones, and the two of them nodded, turned, and walked to one of the hallways leading away from the foyer.
Spencer hurried back to Hamzah’s bedroom, went into the walk-in closet, and shut the door. He knelt behind the large island that held drawers for clothes and shelves for shoes. In the darkness, he set the pistol with its silencer on the floor beside him and took out his knife. He had been hopeful for a minute that Hamzah would be alone in the house. The building was all stone and stucco, and he was sure he could fire his silenced pistol without being heard outside. But he couldn’t be sure that the two men downstairs would not hear a suppressed shot.
He waited. He heard footsteps, and then the door opening. A light came on in the room. He heard feet passing on the way to the bathroom, and then heard the door close. The toilet flushed and he heard the feet walk out and approach the closet.
The closet door swung open, and he heard the footsteps enter. He heard a drawer open, and then he stood and moved toward Faris Hamzah. There was a folded pair of pajamas in Hamzah’s hand when he half turned and saw Spencer. His eyes widened, he dropped the pajamas, and started to turn to run. Without his cane, he was too slow, and Spencer was on him in a second. Spencer pulled Hamzah’s head back and said in his ear in Arabic, “You should have left me alone.” Then he drew the blade of the knife across Hamzah’s throat and dropped him to the floor.
Hamzah lay on the floor bleeding, gripping the wound in both hands. At first the arterial blood spurted between his fingers, squirting the white dresser, blond hardwood floor, and white walls a few times, but he lost consciousness quickly and the blood flowed into a growing pool beside him.
Spencer wiped his hands and his knife on a suit that was hanging from the clothes rack, closed the blade, and put it in his pocket. He looked in the mirror to be sure his clothes hadn’t been painted, but they had. His left arm was red, and there was a streak of blood across his chest. He noticed a row of civilian outfits that looked like his own hanging nearby, and decided on the solution. He went through the bedroom into the bathroom, took off his bloody shirt and washed his hands, arms, and face. He checked his pants and shoes, and then he went back into the closet, took a long Libyan-style shirt, put it on, and then picked up his pistol and turned off the light as he left the closet.
There was a knock on the door, and then the two men from downstairs swung it open and stepped inside. One carried a tray that held a plate and some food, and the other held an open bottle of red wine and a glass. When they saw Spencer, the man with the tray squatted to put it on the floor to free his hands, and the other dropped the glass and wine and tried to draw his gun.
Spencer fired once at that man and saw a hole appear in his forehead, and then shot the other man twice and saw him fall backward.
Spencer dragged the two the rest of the way into the room and closed the door. Then he went through their pockets. One of them had a key fob with a silver stripe along the edge that said RANGE ROVER. Spencer pocketed it, and then stepped back into the closet and fired one round into Faris Hamzah’s head.
He hurried to the storeroom where he had watched the cars arrive, and looked out the window. He could see no lights in any of the windows of the other two buildings in the compound. He could see the three SUVs—two parked by the barracks building, and one still parked at the front entrance to the house. Maybe it was parked there intentionally because Faris Hamzah walked with a cane, or maybe the watchman was supposed to park it somewhere else. It didn’t matter. He made his way down the stairway to the front of the building. He unlocked one of the twin front doors, stepped out, and closed it.
He went to the driver’s door and found it unlocked. He climbed in, started the engine, and drove toward the gate. As the car moved forward he searched the dashboard, the wells on the door panels, and finally found the remote control for the gate clipped to the sun visor. He pressed the button and the gate swung open toward him.
The mechanism seemed incredibly slow, and as the gate inched its way inward, he steered to the center so he would not waste a moment. As soon as there was enough space he steered between the two sides and
pressed the button again so the gate stopped and began to close.
He glanced in the rearview mirror to see if anything had changed inside the compound. There were no new lights, no sounds of gunfire, no figures running yet. He drove on, adding speed as he could.
He was afraid someone had heard him driving out, and would run to the house and notice the men lying in Hamzah’s bedroom. He hoped that the bodyguards would assume the man who had murdered their employer was a member of a rival faction, and Spencer knew those factions would be fifty miles to the northwest of the village, engaged in the competition to control Benghazi. He must head east for Tobruk, the place that was held by Faris Hamzah’s friends and allies.
Spencer kept his speed conservative for a few blocks until he reached the turnoff toward Tobruk, the same route that he and Abdullah had traveled early this morning. Then he began to add speed, driving with both hands on the wheel and his eyes ahead.
The distance to Tobruk from Benghazi was nearly three hundred miles. But Abdullah had not taken him all the way to Benghazi, so he didn’t know how much closer than that he was now. He pushed the speed as hard as he dared, paying more attention to controlling the car than to the speedometer.
Minutes went by, and each time he saw another one pass on the dashboard clock he celebrated. He wished the SUV could fly, or that he could take it off the road and head east across country instead of bouncing along and twisting and turning. He strayed from the center of the highway only to hug the curves. As he came out of one he would aim for the next one he could see ahead, making as much of his head start as he could.
His minutes became an hour, and he was sure now that Hamzah’s men must have sped off toward Benghazi to pursue his killer. He couldn’t be so lucky that they had all fallen asleep and not heard anything.
Spencer was at the end of his second hour of driving and judged he must be nearly halfway to Tobruk when he came around a curve and saw lights about a quarter mile ahead on a long, straight stretch. After a few seconds he could see the lights were a military checkpoint. There were two Humvees parked a few feet apart with a wooden bar between them, and two uniformed men visible in front of them.
Spencer slowed down and opened the glove compartment to see if there were papers for the SUV he was driving. He felt under the seat, glanced for more storage wells in the doors, but found nothing. He quickly shoved the silenced pistol and its spare magazines under his seat.
He knew his best chance was to bluff. Maybe his age and his good Arabic would make him seem innocuous. He slowed to a stop at the roadblock and kept his hands visible on the steering wheel.
A sleepy-looking man in camouflage fatigues stood and walked to Spencer’s window. Spencer opened it and smiled at him expectantly.
The man said, “Where are you going, uncle?”
“I’m driving toward Tobruk, sir,” he said in Arabic.
“I can see that. What is the purpose of your trip?”
“I want to see the doctors at the Tobruk airport from a Canadian relief organization. I heard they’ll be there for another forty-eight hours.”
“Let me see your identification.”
Spencer thought about how carefully he had planned his trip. He had made sure to carry no identification so the Canadians would not be arrested as accomplices if he were killed. Now he regretted the precaution. “I don’t have any with me,” he said. “But my name is Mahmoud Haruq.”
The soldier looked weary. “Get out of the car.”
Spencer got out and stood beside the car. The soldier patted him down, and found nothing except a thick sheaf of Libyan dinars in his pocket.
“You have a lot of money and a new car. Why don’t you have papers?”
“It’s an emergency. I’m supposed to drive to Tobruk and bring back one of the doctors.”
“For whom?”
“For Faris Hamzah.”
“Is that who owns this vehicle?”
“Yes, sir.”
The soldier smiled as he turned to face his companions. “He works for Faris Hamzah.”
The others grinned and shook their heads in disdain. The man sitting on the rock by the road stood up, slung his rifle over his shoulder, and approached. “You work for Faris Hamzah?” he said. “Faris the Great?”
It was clear that these men were not fans of Faris Hamzah. He couldn’t decide how far the enmity went. Would they harm him just because they had contempt for Hamzah?
The second man walked to the side of the SUV and looked in at the empty seats, and then walked to the rear door. He pounded on it with his fist.
Spencer leaned into the open door, grasped the fob of the keys, and pressed the button that opened the door locks. The man lifted the back hatch and said, “Ah. Take a look.”
The first man walked back and joined his comrade at the rear of the vehicle. The men began taking things out. There were three M4 rifles. Spencer glanced at the roadblock ahead, where there was only one man left in front of him. The men in the back leaned the rifles against the bumper and lifted a couple of olive drab ammo cans. He could see they were heavy, which meant they were full.
Spencer scrambled into his vehicle, started it, and threw it into reverse. The two men behind the SUV dived to the side to avoid being hit, and then scrambled to rise as Spencer threw the SUV into drive and roared away from them. He hit the wooden barrier so it swung into the front of the right Humvee and bounced on the ground.
Spencer never let the vehicle slow. As he sped off, there was some yelling and then a burst of automatic weapon fire. He heard the staccato reports, the bang of bullets hitting the steel of the SUV’s interior, its bumpers, its roof. The unsecured hatch flapped up and down as he drove. It absorbed one burst, some of the bullets punching holes in the sheet metal and others pinging up into the sky. Then another short burst came just as the hatch flew open again. Bullets hit the windshield, leaving big blooms of pulverized glass in front of Spencer’s face and to his right.
As Spencer reached the first curve in the highway the hits were fewer, and then there were none. He drove as fast as he dared along the dark highway, trying to put some miles between him and the roadblock.
In his rearview mirror, far behind him, a pair of headlights appeared, and then another. He switched off his headlights and turned the SUV off the road. He drove between low, dark hills that looked like piles of rocks strewn across the hard, dry surface of the Jabal Akhdar plateau. He bumped over slopes, always taking them head-on to keep from tipping the SUV over on its side. He got into ruts so deep that he had to stay in them until he could wrench the wheel to the side and bump out of them.
After a short time, he swung between two low hills and his SUV tilted to the side. The wheels spun and began to dig him in deeper. He rocked the vehicle forward and back, but couldn’t get it out of the holes the wheels were digging. He looked around, and realized the SUV was hemmed in and surrounded by rocky hills that hid it from the road. He reached down to find his pistol, silencer, and magazines still jammed under his seat. He took them and ran around to the rear of the vehicle to see what was left of the weapons and ammunition the soldiers had found. There was nothing.
He stepped on the rocks near the foot of a pile, then hurried along the side into some thick brush. He began to run. Spencer ran hard, asking his body to forget its fatigue for just this hundred yards, and then for the next hundred. When he was a mile from the spot where he had left the SUV, he could see headlights on the road he had left. As he watched, he saw them drift along, and then stop. Slowly, the first Humvee, and then the second, turned off the road and began to bounce across the open land. They were following his SUV’s tracks.
He ran on below the endless glittering specks of stars. He found the Big Dipper, and then followed the line from its cup to the North Star. For a long time he trotted and then he walked, using the last hours of darkness to make his way northeast toward Tobruk.
When the sun came up he slept in the shade of a rocky shelf. When he woke it was afte
rnoon. He stood and walked to the east, stepping toward his own shadow, the western sun falling on his shoulders and his head scarf.
Spencer knew he had not traveled far since he had declared himself to be halfway to Tobruk. He was at least two hundred kilometers from Faris Hamzah’s compound, but he was still that far from the airport at Tobruk, where the Canadian People’s Relief Corps would be waiting for their resupply flight. He had used up half of his seventy-two hours.
His night had left him dehydrated, and he could not go on much longer without water. He was on a stretch of land where he could see no buildings, no sign that human beings had ever been there. There was nothing in sight that suggested he was near water—no trees, no green brush of the sort that grew near wells and streams. His only possessions were a pistol with a suppressor and two full magazines, a good pair of shoes, and his white Libyan clothes. The soldier at the roadblock may not have intended to rob him, but he had never given back the two thousand dinars that Spencer had been carrying. He had only eleven dinars in his pocket, left over from tipping Abdullah.
He would have to keep going a few hours to get far enough from the roadblock he had escaped, then try to find a village where he could get water. If he failed, he would die. The rule of thumb was that it took three days to die of dehydration, but he had spent much of his first night running.
Spencer set a marching pace by counting cadence. He kept his head up and picked a hill that lined up with his shadow and walked toward it so his course would be straight. The road to Tobruk was an arc that swung to the north and then back down, all of it roughly parallel to the sea. If he aimed his steps correctly, then at some point he would intersect with the road.
It was late night when he saw something new ahead of him and to the left. A set of headlights was moving along, the beams shooting into the darkness. From this distance he couldn’t actually see the vehicle. He had no idea if it was a car, a truck, or a bus, but it didn’t matter. It was what the vehicle was driving on that mattered. He had met the road.